CenoJuke music player

[Mario_van_Ginneken]

I want to share a project I’ve been working on for a couple of months. Yes, it’s a music player and yes, there are already lots out there and why not use Spotify? Well, let’s explain…

I’m old fashioned in a way that I really like to “own” my music, like have it on my own computer as a file. It’s the closest thing to a physical record or cassette. Starting in the '90’s, I’ve built a music library of around 20.000 music files using different programs and switching to iTunes as soon as it came out. I loved that program! But the last decade iTunes (or Music as it’s called now) moved away from what I loved most. I mostly use the program to play music and love the volume adjustment, mixing feature (but flawed, like when you skip a record it doesn’t mix) and most of all the automatic play lists based on Last Played, year, genre, etc. You’ll never hear a song twice in a month if you set up everything correctly.

But I also hate a lot of things about iTunes: it’s boring interface, I miss a jukebox-like screensaver that shows info about the song played, if you skip a song manually the player should mix the next song, short-cuts for rating songs and while we’re at it I kept adding things I liked MY player to do. But… It’s still based on the iTunes/Music library (I started building on that to see if I could pull it off). The final step will be to let go of that and have a program that runs on it’s own power/library.

Here are some screenshots of the user interface and the screensaver:

[Mario_van_Ginneken]

Some features

Screensaver:

• full screen showing artwork and info from the song played
• shows background pictures you can add yourself
• can show specific backgrounds linked to artists you really like
• shows current song as a jukebox label, color and shape depend on the year of the song

Player:

• main screen has playlist (songs to be played next) and library
• separate search screen
• option to sort on last played so you always hear something that you haven’t heard in a while
• use playlists based on genre, year, last time played, rating, mood, artist, remarks, etc.
• set the mood of your music to: no “in your face” music, everything or only relaxed,
• songs are always mixed, also if you skip a song
• Scan & Rate Mode does not mix but starts each song 30 seconds from the beginning and does not update date played. This is handy when you’re evaluating
• option to create DJ Set’s: a list of songs in a chosen order. You can load a DJ set and it is added to your playlist

[Sveinn_Runar_Sigurdsson]

Big like! I am a music buff also with a huge offline collection. Do you want to share the executable? For others to use and try your app?

[Mario_van_Ginneken]

The latest version I’m working on is completely separated from iTunes/Apple Music and it’s library, so it can operate as stand alone app. To achieve that I had to add screens to edit music data and a screen to add music to your collection.

I also had to come up with something to measure the volume of a song so the player can adjust it’s volume in an effort to make all songs play on similar volume. For this I use a separate app I downloaded from the internet, called ffmpeg. This seems to get the volume of a track in the correct area with only small adjustments needed sometimes.

You’re welcome to try it but it’s still a work in progress with some bugs in it and it will only work on Mac OSX. I tried it on Windows but it crashes and since I only developed it for personal use (not for distribution) I’m not going to make it work on Windows.

[Sveinn_Runar_Sigurdsson]

I have both mac and Windows (and music library is on my iMac). Would love to try